Wednesday's blog, "America's Education Gordian Knot" in sum had two major assertions: Short of a "black swan," our overall public school system will not change, reform or not; and the most likely yet magical reformation would have to happen with local control accompanied by 50 states agreeing to eliminate elected BOE in favor of competent oversight.
"Magical" was chosen with forethought.🙂
What do you see when you view the landscape of, for example, a public high school? If you believe you are seeing 'fact' you're wrong. What you see is product of your brain's processing of perception, and of your embedded beliefs. Two citizens, living next door to each other, can see the gestalt of a given school totally differently. At the operating level where your taxes are spent, the education insider and the taxpayer, can see that same school in vastly different ways.
That is one reason for the diverse, often chaotic and contradictory rhetoric that swirls around the topic dubbed "corporate reform." This effect is magnified as masses of such views are simplified by their viewers into stereotypes — generalizations that take root and are applied to all cases, becoming the means shaping how judgments happen and actions are triggered.
First, for American primary and secondary education this is further impacted by the 'players' connected to schools' real life operations. Counting for the next blog on the contradictory motivations of the entities that have their fingers in influencing our public systems, my current number of the 'categories' of players is 28 and counting. That framed the conclusion that our public school system, capital S, is not going to quickly transform itself, or be transformed for example by a Betsy DeVos.
There is a second effect from stereotyping our schools. It is reflected throughout the publication, pronouncements, and social networking pumped out either critical of public schools, or equally defending them -- the use of those stereotypes to make the arguments. Our "schools are" something invariant; a "standardized test" is one species; "all superintendents are noble;" "all teachers are "Mr. Chips." The basic concept of variance in all things and phenomena is lost, and not unexpectedly the power of genuine explanation needed to assess and change anything in an orderly manner is also damaged.
Until both our systems' pluggers, and those systems' critics procure real and representative data that scopes our one hundred thousand public schools, over six thousand charters, and thousands of private schools' factual differences, all of the rhetorical sturm und drang remain unproductive endless loops.
The real condemnation of America's last century of oversight of its public education mission has been failure to do the most basic step in real science and research — defining the material constituent parts/actions of those schools, doing the science of transformation to numerically express them, and doing the precision sampling or census to truly describe what's been created. Massing spending on reform of stereotypes without any awareness of the variance around means or any other central tendency is basically intellectually addressing our whole public system as a comic book.
The next blog looks at how the conflicting motivations of those 28+ categories of players, on top of inadequate characterization, make our alleged reform of public education a nearly intractable mess. Likely tweaking some of this audience into a virtual hate frenzy, a fix, as Alexander's to the Gordian Knot, may metaphorically be the sword.
Our system of schools’ control forms a spectrum, from a theoretically pure “local control” (all decisions are local), to our present mixed system with parts of school guidance parceled among local, community, state, external controls (unions and other) ranging from local to national, to Federal implementation of mandates, to direct acts by Congress. Pick your point on the spectrum, and in the spirit of “single payer,” nationalize our public K-12 schools!
Perceptive conservative columnist David Brooks surveying decades of our history, noted the progression of what were American “establishments,” from the “Protestant establishment” post-WWII, to the “meritocratic establishment," to an emerging “populist establishment,” wrapped around cultural destruction and rejection of education and science, he sees healing to be the work of two decades; if our educational change to cope with present knowledge and technology trajectories isn’t in the cards, it’s going to be a long slog for our next generation.
Blog part two, a couple of weeks in the future.
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